Category Archives: Research Type

Science system path-dependencies and their influences: nanotechnology research in Russia

Research evaluation, Research Examples, ST&I policy

In this paper, we study the influence of path dependencies on the development of an emerging technology in a transitional economy. Our focus is the development of nanotechnology in Russia in the period between 1990 and 2012. By examining outputs, publication paths and collaboration patterns, we identify a series of factors that help to explain Russia’s limited success in leveraging its ambitious national nanotechnology initiative. The analysis highlights four path-dependent tendencies of Russian nanotechnology research: publication pathways and the gatekeeping role of the Russian Academy of Sciences; increasing geographical and institutional centralisation of nanotechnology research; limited institutional diffusion; and patterns associated with the internationalisation of Russian research. We discuss policy implications related to path dependence, nanotechnology research in Russia and to the broader reform of the Russian science system.

Full-text available http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-016-1916-3/fulltext.html

Author(s): Maria Karaulova, Abdullah Gök, Oliver Shackleton, Philip Shapira
Organization(s): National Research University Higher School of Economics, University of Manchester
Source: Scientometrics
Year: 2016

S-Curve analysis and technology life cycle. Application in series of data of articles and patents

CTI, Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples

In this article, the methodology of curves in S is applied in series of data on articles in Biotechnology and Nanotechnology since 1956 obtained from the ISI Web of Science and of patents since 1962 (year of priority) and 1970 (year of publication). Belonging to controlled release, of the medical context, the data was obtained from a Tech Mining approach using the Vantage Point software tool. With the accumulated data, in time, nonlinear regression was achieved and the inflection point in the two series was calculated, taking into account the statistical parameters like Fitted R2, Value T, Value P, and Durbin Watson. The data of the articles and patents were analyzed under the following models: Weibull, Gompertz, Logistic and Sigmodial, among others, for a total of 13 models analyzed. The models with the best fit in the inflection point were selected. In the series of data from the articles, one of the models that had the best fit was the Sigmoidal model. The Sigmoidal model contained three parameters which generated a value of 33.4 for the inflection point for the year of the studied series. With the obtained values for the inflection points in the series of articles and patents, the uncertainty can be reduced in the making of decisions about the Technology Life Cycle (TLC), especially in the following aspects: the identification of the kind of technology (before and after of the inflection point), the determination of the suitable moment to apply technological rights and intellectual property, and the establishment of strategies for monitoring (when the technology is emerging) and investment.

Full-text available at http://www.revistaespacios.com/a16v37n07/16370719.html

Author(s): Jhon Wilder ZARTHA Sossa; Fernando PALOP Marro; Bibiana ARANGO Alzate; Fabián Mauricio VELEZ Salazar; and Andres Felipe AVALOS Patiño
Organization(s): Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana,  Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Source: Espacios
Year: 2015

Big Data in the Social Sciences

Citation analysis, Research Examples, Research profiling

Recent emerging technology policies seek to diminish negative impacts while equitably and responsibly accruing and distributing benefits.  Social scientists play a role in these policies, but relatively little quantitative research has been performed to study how social scientists inform the assessment of emerging technologies. This paper addresses this gap by examining social science research on “Big Data” – an emerging technology of wide interest. This paper analyzes a dataset of fields extracted from 488 social science and humanities papers written about Big Data. Our focus is on understanding the multi-dimensional nature of societal assessment by examining the references upon which these papers draw. We find that eight sub-literatures are important in framing social science research about Big Data. These results indicate that the field is evolving from general sociological considerations toward applications issues and privacy concerns. Implications for science policy and technology assessment of societal implications are discussed.

Preprint available at http://works.bepress.com/jan_youtie/80/

Author(s): Jan Youtie and Alan Porter
Organizations: Georgia Institute of Technology
Source: Science and Public Policy
Year: 2016

Global patent analysis of power lithium-ion battery separator

Data Type, Patents, Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type

The development of technologies related to power lithium-ion battery separator has been taken place in recent years. In order to provide appropriate decision references for the industry development, patent analysis was carried out. On the basis of Derwent Innovation Index (DII), global patents related to power lithium-ion battery separator were analyzed from aspects of global development scale and trend, technology fields, geographic distribution, top assignees. The findings show that power lithium-ion battery separator industry has entered fast-growth stage. In branch technology fields, raw materials are the priority research and development (R&D) areas of power lithium-ion battery separator. Japan has applied for a large number of patents and occupied the leading position. Asahi Kasei Chemicals Corporation, Toray industries, Tonen Chemical Corporation possess strategic advantages over other enterprises in the current competitive situation of international separator market.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7385791&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D7385791

Author(s): Na Li; Quan Guan ; Siming Tan ; Yunfei Wang ; Zhiyong Chu ; Jin Liu
Organization(s): Qingdao Institute of Science & Tech. Inf.
Source: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM)
Year: 2015

Subject–action–object-based morphology analysis for determining the direction of technological change

Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples, Research Type, Tech mining,

Morphology analysis, despite being a strong stimulus for the development of new alternatives, largely relies on domain experts and neglects the relationships between keywords in the construction of morphological structures. In addition, there are few systematic approaches to prioritize the morphological configurations. To address these issues, a hybrid approach is proposed, which enhances the performance of morphology analysis by combining it with subject–action–object (SAO) semantic analysis. Initially, a keyword co-occurrence patent set for subsequent SAO analysis is prepared based on keywords frequency vector analysis. Then, SAO structures are extracted and semantic analysis is performed to identify the relationships between keywords, which help to build morphological structures more objectively. In addition, a well-defined evaluation system that contains eight sub-indexes is proposed to evaluate the morphological configurations. Finally, to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach, the dye-sensitized solar cells technology is employed as the case study. Results indicate that the most promising combination we predict appears frequently in 2012–2014 and the distribution of it is also close to the fact in 2012–2014. Accordingly, the proposed method can be used to effectively determine the direction of technological change and to forecast technology innovation opportunities.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162516000299

Author(s): Junfang Guo, Xuefeng Wang, Qianrui Li, Donghua Zhu
Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology
Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change
Year: 2016

Topic analysis and forecasting for science, technology and innovation: Methodology with a case study focusing on big data research

CTI, Funding, Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples,

Highlights

  • Data-driven clustering approach to group topics with high accuracy
  • Similarity measure approach to trace the interaction between topics in time series
  • Analyzing changes of TFIDF values of related topics to predict future trends
  • Technology Roadmapping to blend historical analysis and expert-based forecasting

The number and extent of current Science, Technology & Innovation topics are changing all the time, and their induced accumulative innovation, or even disruptive revolution, will heavily influence the whole of society in the near future. By addressing and predicting these changes, this paper proposes an analytic method to (1) cluster associated terms and phrases to constitute meaningful technological topics and their interactions, and (2) identify changing topical emphases. Our results are carried forward to present mechanisms that forecast prospective developments using Technology Roadmapping, combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies. An empirical case study of Awards data from the United States National Science Foundation, Division of Computer and Communication Foundation, is performed to demonstrate the proposed method. The resulting knowledge may hold interest for R&D management and science policy in practice.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162516000160

Author(s): Yi Zhang, Guangquan Zhang, Hongshu Chen, Alan L. Porter, Donghua Zhu, Jie Lu
Organization(s): University of Technology Sydney, Georgia Institute of Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology
Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change
Year: 2016

BIBLIOMETRICAL ANALYSIS OF YANGTZE RESEARCH BASED ON WEB OF SCIENCE FROM 1900 TO 2012

Research Examples, Research profiling

In order to reveal the Yangtze research’s hotspot and development, we chose Web of Science as the data source, using the bibliometric method and Thomson Data Analyzer (TDA), and conducted a quantitative analysis on the number of published papers, countries, institutions, authors, journals, subjects and keywords. The result shows that (1) the Yangtze research could be divided into three stages, i.e., the initial development period, the exploration period and the rapid development period. (2) China published the most papers of Yangtze research, the main foreign countries and institutions come from the United States, Japan, and Australia. (3) Chinese Academy of Science is the major institution for Yangtze research. (4) Domestic and international concerns rest ongeology, environmental science, water resource and meteorology.

Author(s): PENG Nai-zhu, ZHONG Yong-heng
Organization(s): Chinese Academy of Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE YANGTZE BASIN 2015
Year: 2015

Chinese energy and fuels research priorities and trend: A bibliometric analysis

Research Examples, Research profiling, ST&I policy

This study aims to summarize an overview of Chinese energy and fuels research using comprehensive bibliometric analysis measures based on data extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded database from 1993 to 2012. Keyword analysis was used to assess and evaluate the priorities, topics and topic shifts using the Thomson Data Analyzer (TDA). In particular, popular topics were demonstrated using bubble charts. The results show that solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen were the most important topics. The priorities of energy and fuels research in China were hydrogen and fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries, biodiesel and biomass, coal, and solar energy, respectively. Of course, lithium-ion batteries have entered substantive application stages in China in 2012. The hydrogen economy has been formed. Biomass and biodiesel research was the popular topic, as well as hydrogen and fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries. But solar energy was not still “hot”. The characteristics of the types of documents, languages, year, journals, institutions and co-publishing countries were analyzed, as well as the keyword occurrence frequencies. It can be stated that 19,089 articles by Chinese authors were published in 106 journals. More than one-third of the articles were published in the Journal of Power Sources, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and Bioresource Technology. The Chinese Academy of Science, Tsinghua University, China University of Petroleum, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Zhejiang University were the top five institutions. The USA was the leading inter-collaborative country, followed by Japan, the UK and Canada. The findings presented here provide an overall picture of the development of Chinese energy and fuels research and could also help policy makers assess the impact of the resource allocation decisions made in the past to develop energy policies and strategies for the future.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032115016226

Author(s): Hua-Qi Chen, Xiuping Wang, Li He, Ping Chen, Yuehua Wan, Lingyun Yang, Shuian Jiang
Organization(s): Taizhou University, Zhejiang University
Source: Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Year: 2015

Semantic-Based Technology Trend Analysis

Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples, ST&I indicators, Tech mining,

Technology trend analysis offers a flexible instrument to understand both opportunity and competition for emerging technologies. Semantic information is used in Science, Technology & Innovation (ST&I) records which makes the technology trend analysis more challenging. This paper proposes a semantic-based approach for technology trend analysis through emphasizing Subject-Action-Object (SAO) structure, It also applies the trend analysis approach to extract technology information and identify and predict the trend of technology development more effectively. An empirical study on Graphene is completed to demonstrate the proposed trend analysis approach.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7383052&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D7383052

Author(s): Yang, Chao ; Zhu, Donghua ; Zhang, Guangquan
Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Technology Sydney
Source:  2015 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering (ISKE)
Year: 2015

Aesthetics in the age of digital humanities

Network analysis, Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type, Science mapping, VOSViewer

One of the most difficult but yet unavoidable tasks for every academic field is to define its own nature and demarcate its area. This article addresses the question of how current computational text-mining approaches can be used as tools for clarifying what aesthetics is when such approaches are combined with philosophical analyses of the field. We suggest that conjoining the two points of view leads to a fuller picture than excluding one or the other, and that such a picture is useful for the self-understanding of the discipline. Our analysis suggests that text-mining tools can find sources, relations, and trends in a new way, but it also reveals that the databases that such tools use are presently seriously limited. However, computational approaches that are still in their infancy in aesthetics will most likely gradually affect our understanding about the ontological status of the discipline and its instantiations.

Open Access article…. for full-text, click http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/30072

Author(s): Ossi Naukkarinen and Johanna Bragge
Organization: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture; Aalto University School of Economics
Source: Journal of Aesthetics and Culture
Year: 2016